Tag: spring 2025 anime season

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch: UMA MUSUME – CINDERELLA GRAY Episode 5 – “What’s Best For Her”

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime.

For the Cinderella Gray column, new installments will be posted either on the Sunday each episode airs, or as soon as possible over the succeeding week. Expect spoilers!

Cinderella Gray was never going to be all victory forever. No series is that, certainly not any sports anime and definitely not Uma Musume. (Even Season 2, which is the cleanest path-charting superstar story in the franchise, is defined perhaps even more by its dramatic, tragic moments as its triumphant ones.)

That said, the kind of dramatic conflict that emerges here is a bit surprising. Not unwelcome, but at the very least it isn’t something I saw coming.

First, a bit of racetrack politic: horse races in Japan (at least, in the Uma Musume universe, but I have little reason to assume this isn’t also true in real life) are separated into national and regional races. So far, Oguri Cap’s story has been at the regional level. The Tokai Derby she aims to run in against Fujimasa March, the race both she and her trainer Kitahara Jou dream of winning, is a regional race. To that end, the episode opens on Oguri competing in the Chukyo Hai, another regional race and a stop along the path to the Derby. She wins by a complete blowout, in fact. To the point that the race itself is basically an afterthought. This is all well and good, but as we learned last week, it’s not just the usual crowd of horsegirl enthusiasts watching the race, also present is Symboli Rudolf, president of Tracen Academy. Rudolf is extremely impressed by what she sees on the track, and sets about recruiting her to compete in the nationals. She talks to Kitahara first, and he is both starstruck and extremely intimidated that she wants to talk to him. Moreso when he finds out what she actually wants.

Cinderella Gray uses a fun structural trick in this episode, wherein after Kitahara’s talk with Rudolf, we actually cut to a flashback wherein a young Kitahara is first drafted into being a horsegirl trainer by his uncle Roppei. After we return to the present, Oguri is running training laps at her usual spot, and something has clearly happened to badly affect Kitahara’s mood, but we don’t yet know what.

The plain and pragmatic truth of the matter is this; Kitahara isn’t licensed to train on a national level. If Oguri Cap is recruited to compete in national races, she will have to leave Kitahara behind.

There is quite a lot of dancing around this through much of the episode’s middle third. Kitahara’s entire vibe is very off, and Oguri even picks up on it. (Not that it’s hard to tell that someone is out of sorts when they, say, forget to press the “start” button on a stopwatch when timing you. But still.) The drama here is pretty compelling, and through the earlier flashback, the series implies some prior failure on Kitahara’s part that has led to him being so hard on himself in the present day, although we don’t yet know what that might have been. Still, it takes a weeping Belno Light—the heart of the group, here—to get some sense through to him. What he wants or what Belno herself might want aren’t the important things, they have to ask Oguri what she wants directly.

Which, itself, Kitahara can’t seem to do in a straightforward way. He delivers the news firstly in a cloying, faux-bombastic tone, and then when Oguri asks if she’d be able to keep him as her trainer, starts viciously self-deprecating under a thin veneer of taking it instride. I love this entire scene, and it makes the whole episode. It really puts both Kitahara and Oguri’s personalities fully on display and shows what happens when they clash. Jou is, by this point, very much convinced that he has to take the loss and let Oguri go, and outright says at several points across the episode that he feels that he’s holding her back. His self-defeating mentality has already made this a given for him, and he doesn’t see any way out of it. Oguri, for her part, is upset, even offended that Kitahara would assume that she’d want to race anywhere where he wasn’t her trainer. Oguri is a very straightforward and direct person, and it’s clear that she’s been taking this talk of a shared dream of winning the Tokai Derby very seriously. She doesn’t say so outright, but it’s easy to imagine that even just being asked to race under a different trainer might feel like a betrayal.

And so, she storms off. Reminding Kitahara that the Tokai Derby is “our dream.” Were it that things ended there, this might seem like something of an anticlimax, but Kitahara doesn’t have the luxury of any kind of relief. He gets a phone call. Symboli Rudolf is on the other end of the line, and while she’s polite, she makes her position on the matter clear.

Thus, we come to the episode’s end, where Kitahara gives Oguri an ultimatum. In her next race, if she wins, she will be transferred to the nationals. If she loses, the two of them will aim for the Tokai Derby together.

That’s a rough hand to deal someone, and I am extremely interested in how Oguri is going to play it, especially with hints elsewhere in the episode that the national racing press are starting to catch on to the phenomenon brewing in Kasamatsu. The Gray Monster is waking up, and everyone but Oguri herself seems to be looking toward her eventual national rise to fame with great interest. Tamamo Cross, in a post-victory interview after one of her own races, makes note of her, while elsewhere mention is made that the two of them are defying a long-standing stereotype that ashen-coat horse girls can’t run. (A detail so bizarrely specific I can only imagine it’s a translation of some weird foible of actual horse racing culture.)

So ends an absolutely fantastic episode. There are tons of little details I haven’t had the space to cleanly fit in, and it’s hard to not just cram them all in here at the end. Belno blacksmithing new cleats for Oguri? The whole weird push and pull between Kitahara and his uncle Roppei, who seemed to know this entire thing with Oguri transferring to the nationals would play out how it did? Symboli Rudolf herself, who is fantastic here and whose nickname of “The Emperor” is treated almost literally given how everyone reacts to her? All told, this episode, its smaller, less-serious moments but especially its coiling tension, is the exact kind of stake-raising this show needed, and I am riveted to see where it all goes. The world is watching, Oguri Cap! What will you do?

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: UMA MUSUME CINDERELLA GREY at the Starting Gate

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

Somehow, this is the first full article I’ve devoted on this site to Uma Musume. I have to admit that that’s mostly my own fault, I was very late to this particular party, and only got onboard the proverbial horse-drawn carriage earlier this year. (I still haven’t seen the series’ proper third season.) Uma Musume, occasionally also called Pretty Derby, is a series whose reputation precedes it, given its odd premise and ties to a large, very successful franchise that most English-speaking anime fans are unfamiliar with beyond said premise.

The long and short of it is this; Uma Musume takes place in a world where horse-eared animal girls compete in vigorous races. The horse girls are named after actual, real horses—and in Uma Musume’s fiction they actually are those horses, reborn into the show’s setting—and the races themselves are largely patterned after real races. Using the real-world horse races as a scaffolding, Uma Musume then constructs a triumphant, pulse-pounding sports anime. Visually, the later Uma Musume entries, especially the OVA series Road To The Top and the movie Beginning of a New Era (which I have been trying to write an article about for months, incidentally) are some of the best and most intense anime of the 2020s, and one ignores them because they’re “silly” at their own peril. The rough-around-the-edges first season followed ambitious sweetheart Special Week. Season 2 traced the path of rocketship superstar Tokai Teio and her shonen rivalry girlfriend Mejiro McQueen. The Road To The Top OVAs studied a trio of often-intense rising stars, and the New Era film explored a rivalry between its leads that bordered on a deranged, psychosexual obsession. Each entry in the series has been increasingly spectacular, especially visually, which only makes sense. Remember: this is a sports anime.

All this in mind, Cinderella Gray has big horseshoes to fill, following as it does the story of Oguri Cap [Takayanagi Tomoyo] and her rise to fame. Perhaps wisely, right out the gate, Cinderella Gray actually engages in some scaling-back from the New Era film, the otherwise most-recent Uma Musume anime. We don’t begin our story at Tracen, the prestigious racing academy from the previous three seasons of the anime. Instead, our setting is a smaller academy that trains racers for regional competitions.

Our point of view character for most of this opening bit of scene-setting isn’t actually Oguri Cap herself, but rather Berno Light [Seto Momoko, in what looks to be one of her first roles], a much more ordinary horse girl (although one whose cute hair decorations shaped like capital Bs should not be ignored), and it’s through her that we get some sense of the reduced grandeur here. When she asks her homeroom teacher about the national races, she’s just straight up told that it’s not something she needs to worry about. A little rough! Inauspicious beginnings for what’s sure to be a tale of a meteoric rise to the top!

In fact, the very first character we follow isn’t even Berno, but rather Kitahara Jou [Konishi Katsuyuki], a trainer—and a human, as is traditional in Uma Musume’s trainer / horse girl setup—who laments the sorry state of the local scene. He’s looking for a star, and he’s pretty sure he’s not going to find one in the Gifu regionals.

Enter, of course, Oguri Cap. Cap, whose real-life counterpart was nicknamed “The Gray Monster,” is presented here as, essentially, an old-school shonen protagonist. She’s kind of dim, eats her own weight in food on the regular, and trains way, way harder than anyone else. She’s an archetype to be sure, but an instantly likeable and endearing one. “Someone you can root for from the bottom of your heart,” per Jou’s own words.

Not everyone necessarily feels that way, though. For much of her first day (and thus much of this episode), Oguri Cap is actually bullied by a trio of delinquent horses; the gyaru Norn Ace, the mean-looking Rudy Lemono, and the decidedly short Mini the Lady.

Lest anyone get the impression that Uma Musume is taking a sharp turn into being a school drama however, Oguri Cap is actually so oblivious to anything that’s not food or running that these attempts to get under her skin completely slide off of her. Up to and including Norn Ace, her dormmate, making her sleep in a supply closet. (Oguri, the very definition of a cartoon country girl, is just stoked to have her own room.)

She has the last laugh anyway. The episode’s final stretch consists of a practice race where Cap is set to run against Rudy, Mini, and Berno, and the former two prank her by undoing her shoelaces before the start of the race. In spite of having to stop to re-tie them, Oguri absolutely annihilates her competition, leaving them in the dust as she blasts past them, completely outpacing them.

Uma Musume has developed its own visual language with which to depict racing as its gone on; broad sweeping ‘karate chop’ hand motions, coiled cock-and-fire pistol shots of forward, springing motion, glowing Black Rock Shooter eyes and electrical auras, and so on. Oguri is drawn in a subtly different way, telegraphing her unusual gait, the secret weapon that makes her interesting to Jou beyond her raw talent, it’s explicated in just a line or two of dialogue, but as is often the case with Uma Musume, seeing is believing.

Can we root for Oguri Cap from the bottom of our hearts? It doesn’t take much to convince me when the show looks this good, but I do really think that this is not only a treat for longtime fans of the series but also an ideal jumping-on point for anyone who’s been waiting for one. Being set chronologically earlier in the franchise than seasons 1-3 means that the attention-grabbing cameos of previous seasons’ characters are kept to a minimum. There’s no real risk of feeling lost here, so I would say that just about anyone should check this thing out. You really have nothing to lose. (If anything, I think longtime fans are the ones more likely to have nitpicks. One could argue this is a slower start than, say, the first episode of season two. But this feels like such a minor point that, to me at least, it isn’t really worth making.)

Personally, what interests me most is not just Oguri Cap and the way she runs. We’re introduced to another horse girl here as well, alongside Cap, Berno, and the delinquent trio. That girl, Fujimasa March [Ise Mariya], who shares Cap’s white-gray hair and her immense talent as a runner, but is distinguished by an intense, sharp gaze, and a serious demeanor, seems like she’s being set up as Cap’s long-term rival. As Oguri Cap wins her practice race, blowing her competition out of the water, March is watching from the sidelines, ignoring the trainers trying to get her attention. Fujimasa March clearly knows that something big has just happened. In a subtle way, here in this particular place, the world has changed, and she can feel it. Can you?

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

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